The Crazy Women of Plaza de Mayo

By Salima Rivera
Me llaman La Loca de la Plaza de Mayo.
Every day I go to look for my son,
a prisoner of a treacherous tyranny
or maybe he lays rotting in an unknown grave.
I don’t know.
Every day I go down to the Plaza
to raise my voice in chorus with the others,
“¡Malditos asesinos! Give us our sons.
Tell us what are their crimes—
what have they done?”
They laugh at us, call us crazy.
I’m crazy because I want to know
the fate of my son whose only crime
was to say we are hungry.
I’m crazy because he raged against
the injustice of it, watching us slowly die
having no dreams of our own to nourish us.
I’m crazy because I love this boy—
flesh of my womb—
who did the only thing a man
with nothing left but his dignity could do.
And they laugh at me;
these bloated jackals glutted
with the blood of our offspring.
So drunk with their power,
so blissfully unaware
that this crazy woman,
the mother they ridicule and scorn,
carries deep within her the sprouted seed
of their destruction,
the bloody beginning to the end of their rule.
Y me llaman La Loca.

Notes:

“The Crazy Women of Plaza de Mayo” was first published in Third Woman (Third Woman Press, 1981) and subsequently published in It’s Not About Dreams (Erato/Poetry, 2014).

This poem is part of the portfolio “Salima Rivera: A Chicago Rican Poet.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the March 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (March 2024)